Sunday, April 29, 2012

Last
night’s “Man Men” episode did not really introduce any new historical events,
but reiterates themes from the first six episodes of the season. “At the
Codfish Ball” continues to reveal the growing liberalization of American
culture during the Age of Aquarius.

Like prominent
musicians of the 1960s such as the Beach Boys and the Beatles, Roger Sterling
feels inspired by the LSD trip he had in last week’s episode. Rather than
simply drinking and going through the motions as usual, Sterling is embarrassed
that his wealthy family handed everything to him on a silver platter and now wants
to earn his keep at the firm. His first
wife tells him not to be apologetic about his advantages and that she’s “not
going to let a bunch of dirty teenagers in the paper disrupt the order of
things.” Her comment is an obvious
reference to the anti-establishment rhetoric of the youth culture.

After Abe
insists Peggy meet him for an important dinner, Joan suspects he will propose.
In a twist, though, Abe suggests they move in together. Though she agrees, Peggy appears disappointed he didn’t ask her to marry him. While such arrangements are common today, it was rare for
unmarried people to live together in the mid-1960s, even in liberal New York City.
Peggy’s Catholic mother is extremely unhappy with the new state of
affairs, declaring they will be “living in sin” and that Abe is just interested
in sex. Even a decade later in 1976,
“Three’s Company,” a television show that depicted a man living with two women
he wasn’t sleeping with, sparked controversy when it premiered.

Upset
over her mother’s disapproval, Peggy sarcastically says that she thought her mom
would be “relieved I wasn’t marrying the Jew.”
Though her mother claims that religion isn’t the issue, intermarriage between
Jews and Catholics was very rare in the mid-1960s. In fact, it was uncommon for Jews to marry
outside their faith until the 1970s.

The show
continues to become more open about sexuality as the decade progresses. Last week, we saw Peggy service a total stranger
at a movie theater. This week, poor
Sally walks in on Roger being serviced by Megan’s mom! Speaking of which, I should have mentioned earlier
that we meet Megan’s parents.
Shockingly, they are yet another unhappy married couple.

Megan has
a professional breakthrough this week as she solves the persistent problem of
the Heinz account. Her idea is to
produce an ad that shows families eating beans throughout history, culminating
with one having them for dinner on a lunar colony. Heinz loves the idea because in 1966, as the
moon race launched by JFK continued, it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that
people would eventually live on the lunar surface. Believe it or not, Newt
Gingrich wasn’t the first to suggest it.
See http://popculturemeetshistory.blogspot.com/2012/03/50th-anniversary-of-john-glenns-flight.html.

Smoking remains
a point of contention as Don accepts an award from the American Cancer Society
for writing a letter denouncing the tobacco companies in last season’s episode,
“Blowing Smoke.” Megan has reproached
Don for his smoking on a couple of occasions this season, which Betty, a smoker
herself, never did. Still, Ken mentions
that new tobacco labeling legislation doesn’t dramatically affect the industry
and we see several people puffing at the cancer society dinner!

While “At
the Codfish Ball” doesn’t have as many historical references, it was fun and
entertaining. Roger is back in form and
Megan appears unhappy with advertising, despite her obvious talent for it. It will be interesting to see how these
characters evolve throughout the remainder of the season.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

As has
often been the case in “Mad Men,” gender is at the center of this week’s
episode, entitled “Far Away Places.”
Both Peggy and Megan are frustrated that the men in their lives don’t
want them to have a full role in the workplace. Meanwhile, the drug culture
makes an appearance as we watch a dinner party drop LSD.

Once
again, Peggy is more focused on her work than her personal life, a state of
affairs that doesn’t sit well with her left-wing boyfriend, Abe Drexler. Abe tells her that half the time she is not
interested in having sex and then simply goes through the motions of doing
it. After Peggy says she needs a little
time to rest after work, Drexler retorts, “You sound like my dad!” While Abe works for the Village Voice and is often the house radical on the show, his
attitude reminds us that the New Left of the 1960s drew the line at sexual equality. In fact, second wave feminism grew out of the
protests of women in the civil rights and antiwar movements who were upset
about their exclusion from important decisions.

After an
unsuccessful presentation, Peggy gets aggressive with the Heinz representative
and he demands she be taken off the account.
It seems likely he would have had a different response if Don or another
man had behaved in a similar fashion.
Speaking of Don, he continues to be indifferent to his work and demands
Megan leave with him for a trip to upstate New York, even though she was
supposed to help Peggy with the Heinz presentation. Megan is frustrated and tells Don, “You can
like to work but I can’t like to work.” After she doesn’t like the ice cream he
orders and refuses to get in the car with him, the couple fights as Megan declares,
”Get in the car. Eat ice cream. Leave
work. Take off your dress. Yes master!”
The last phrase is likely a reference to the hit television show “I
Dream of Jeannie,” (1965-70) where Barbara Eden’s genie routinely exclaimed,
“Yes master!” to the requests from Larry Hagman’s astronaut character. Reminiscent of his old battles with Betty, he
drives off, leaving Megan alone at a roadside Howard Johnsons.

Meanwhile,
Jane and (gasp) Roger go to a dinner at Dr. Timothy Leary’s apartment where
they “turn on” by dropping LSD. With his
philosophy of “turn on, tune in, drop out” Leary, who had a Ph.D. in psychology
from Berkeley, was a real-life advocate for experimenting with drugs. Though Roger is clearly affected by the LSD,
he still enjoys his usual drinking and smoking while on his acid trip as the
Beach Boys’ groundbreaking album, “Pet Sounds,” plays in the background. Written by lead singer Brian Wilson while under
the influence of LSD, “Pet Sounds” represented an important moment in the
evolution of rock n’ roll from the sanitized music of the early 1960s to the
more complex sounds of the latter part of the decade. Released in 1966, Wilson’s work provided some
of the inspiration for the Beatles recording of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band” the following year. The scene
again reveals Roger’s disengagement from the events of the time, as the camera
pans to Roger as Wilson sings, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.”

In another
historical note, Michael Ginsberg reveals that he was adopted after he was born
in a concentration camp. The 1960s
witnessed a growing awareness of the Holocaust as anti-Semitism diminished and
American culture became more open to discussion of victimhood. Many historians believe the 1961 war crimes trial
of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, when many survivors first offered public testimony
about Nazi atrocities, served as a turning point. The Six-Day War of 1967, where Israel quickly
routed its Arab neighbors after weeks of rhetoric that the Jewish state would
be annihilated, brought the Holocaust further into public discourse.

The
episode ends with Bert Cooper reproaching Don for abdicating his
responsibilities and putting “a little girl” in charge, a condescending
reference to Peggy. Don then stands alone
in the conference room while the younger workers walk purposefully through the
hallway, another sign of the rising power of the youth culture as well as Don’s
diminishing importance.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The banality
of the suburbs is the central theme of this week’s Mad Men episode, “Signal
30.” Pete Campbell is horribly unhappy
living out in Greenwich and he and Trudy have become the new version of Don and
Betty. They are the couple that appears to have everything on the outside: a
plethora of consumer goods, a nice home, and a child. The reality, however, is not nearly as
pleasant, as Pete tells Don, “I have nothing.”

Suburbs
have a long history in the United States dating to the late 19th century,
when streetcars enabled people to escape the congestion and crime of the city
for the more rural life of the suburbs. It
almost seemed that Americans had a Jeffersonian urge to return to something
resembling the agrarian ways of their ancestors. Of course, some native-stock Americans had
less high-minded motives and were simply trying to escape the diverse immigrant
population that increasingly dominated urban life in the early 20th
century. With the emergence of cars,
suburbs grew significantly during the 1920s although their rise stalled during
the 1930s with the onset of Great Depression.

After the
end of World War II, suburbs expanded dramatically. Assisted by the postwar economic boom and
federal housing loans, millions of middle-class Americans left the cities in
the 1950s and purchased their first home, with 83 percent of population growth
occurring in the suburbs (Patterson, Grand
Expectations, p. 333). New York City witnessed particularly dramatic change,
as the suburban population rose by 58 percent as urban dwellers left for
Westchester County, Long Island, and Connecticut (Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p.333). Some whites also moved because of the black and
Puerto Rican migration to the city during this time. Faced with the loss of a significant portion
of their middle-class fan base, the city could no longer support three baseball
teams and the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left for California in 1957. The Yankees did not have the city to themselves
for long, though, as major league baseball created the expansion New York Mets
in 1962 (note the conspicuous placing of Lane Price’s Mets banner in his
office)

Critiques
of the suburbs are almost as old as the institution itself. During the 1950s, many intellectuals viewed
the suburbs as bastions of homogenous thinking. “The suburb,” the
sociologist David Riesman wrote in The Lonely Crowd, was “like a
fraternity house at a small college in which like-mindedness reverberates upon
itself.” Betty Friedan went further, calling
them “comfortable concentration camps” for housewives in her classic feminist
tract, the Feminine Mystique (1963).

From the
outset, “Mad Men” has featured a heavy
dose of the anti-suburban ideology. Since
season one, Betty Draper has seemed completely unhappy in the ‘burbs and I have
always thought that her first name was an homage to Friedan. Furthermore, Don seems much happier in his
city life with Megan and doesn’t even want to go to the Campbell’s suburban
home for a party on a Saturday night, saying, “that’s when you really want to
blow your brains out.” Afterward, he
declares, “when I close my eyes and then I open them I want to see
skyscrapers.”

Though
Pete and Trudy’s relationship had been the strongest of any couple on the show, the
birth of their first child and the move to the suburbs seems to have wrecked
it. She probably has postpartum
depression and he appears miserable to the point that he makes a pass on an 18
year-old girl in his driving class (he never learned growing up in
Manhattan). In a move reminiscent of Don
in the old days, he also has a liaison with a prostitute while wooing a client.

”It seems
like time is speeding up,” says Jenny, the student Pete is pursuing. Though a few contemporary events are
mentioned, such as Charles Whitman’s mass shooting of students at the
University of Texas, this episode focuses less on the social changes of 1966
than the previous four. Instead, it
centers on the age-old theme of the unhappy suburbanite, which has been a standby
of film and television for over a half-century.

For more
on the history of suburbs, Kenneth Jackson, The
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York,
1985)

Friday, April 13, 2012

As major
league baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day on Sunday, it is remarkable that
the number of African Americans in baseball has fallen from a quarter of all
players during the mid-1970s to 8.5 percent in 2011(Ruck, Raceball, 177; “2011 Race and Gender Report Card,” p. 1). Indeed, Hispanics have surpassed blacks as
the largest minority in the game and there is little sign that the number of
African Americans playing in the majors will increase anytime soon. Though the
integration of baseball was a seminal event in the civil rights movement, most young
blacks going into professional sports today seem to prefer basketball and
football.

It was
not always this way. During the first
half of the 20th century, the major leagues were segregated, but
baseball was at the center of black culture.
After players and owners drew the color line in the 1890s, a number of
independent teams such as the Cuban Giants continued the tradition of
African-American baseball. With the
Great Migration of blacks to the North during World War I, a fan and consumer
base emerged capable of supporting a league. Organized under the leadership of former
pitcher Rube Foster in 1920, the Negro Leagues became one of a number of
African-American institutions that sustained black life under Jim Crow. Though they often labored in obscurity
compared to their white contemporaries, players such as catcher Josh Gibson and
pitcher Satchel Paige were among the best in the sport in the 1930s and 40s,
even if they never played in the majors (Gibson) or didn’t during their prime
(Paige)

After
struggling during the Depression, the Negro Leagues thrived during World War
II, as a number of forces laid the groundwork for integration. The fight
against fascism and Nazi racism abroad exposed the contradictions between
American rhetoric and American practice.
Black sportswriters agitated for major league teams to sign black
players, with help from liberal politicians and the Communist Party. The passing of Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain
Landis in 1944, who had long held the line on segregation, opened the door for
change. Brooklyn Dodgers’ GM Branch
Rickey walked through it when he signed Jackie Robinson, then playing for the
Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, to a contract in 1945.

When
Robinson played his first game as a Dodger on April 15, 1947, he debuted a year
before President Truman integrated the military and nearly a decade before the
epochal civil rights landmarks of Brown
v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Robinson faced incredible racism in his early
years in the league, but excelled, paving the way for a parade of black stars
in subsequent years, including Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. As a result, the Negro Leagues declined and disbanded. Not every
team quickly followed Brooklyn’s lead, however, as the Boston Red Sox only
became the final team to integrate in 1959.
While black players entered the league, there were no African American
managers or coaches in the majors during this time, as the end of the Negro
Leagues meant the loss of opportunities for blacks in these positions.

The 1960s
and 70s were the heyday of African American participation in the majors as well
as the game’s popularity in black America.
As ESPN’s Michael Wilbon recalled, “The talk in the barbershop wasn’t of
Wilt and Russell nearly as much as it was of Aaron and Mays.” (Washington Post, April 14, 2007) In the face of racism and death threats in
1974, Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. The percentage of blacks in the major leagues
reached an all-time high of 27 percent the following year as 16 black players, comprising 40 percent of all non-pitchers, played in the 1975 All-Star Game (Ruck,
177-178).

The
change seemed to begin in the 1980s as other sports emerged. The National Basketball Association (NBA) had
nearly gone bankrupt during the disco era, in part because some viewers and
advertisers saw the league as “too black.”
The merger with the American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1976
brought Julius “Dr. J” Erving into the league, reviving it, followed by the arrival
of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, whose rivalry helped make it comparable to
football and baseball in terms of popularity.
The arrival of Michael Jordan then sent the league into a stratosphere
by the 1990s, with millions of young black (and white) kids wanting “to be like
Mike.”

Football
grew and surpassed baseball in popularity while featuring plenty of black
players on the field, but there was one major position that remained closed to
African Americans as late as the 1980s—quarterback. Racial stereotypes suggested that blacks did
not have the intelligence and leadership skills to run an NFL offense. It was routine for pro coaches to move a black
college quarterback to another position after he was drafted. Those that insisted on playing QB had to
leave for the Canadian Football League (CFL), as future Hall of Famer Warren
Moon did for several years in the early 1980s.

The Washington
Redskins’ Doug Williams punctured this myth when he threw five touchdown passes
in a victorious MVP performance in Super Bowl XXII in 1988. In the following years, Donovan McNabb, Steve
McNair, and others achieved success as quarterbacks. The Atlanta Falcons and Oakland Raiders
drafted Michael Vick and Jamarcus Russell 1st overall in the NFL Draft
in 2001 and 2007, respectively, something that would have been inconceivable as
late as the 1990s. Though black QBs do
not yet face a completely even playing field, they are unlikely to be forced to
change roles anymore. The opportunity to
play the prestige position has encouraged more young African Americans to
pursue football at the expense of baseball.

The
number of blacks in the game remained reasonably high, as there was a lag before
declining youth participation impacted the percentage of African Americans
playing the game. As late as the mid-1990s, there were still as many blacks as
Latinos in the majors and Ken Griffey, Jr. and Barry Bonds competed for the title
of “best player in the game, ” though their choice of the sport was no doubt
influenced by the fact that they were both the sons of star players.

For the
most part, it appears the decline of black players reflects greater sports
options rather than discrimination. Both
college basketball and football hold out the promise for earlier stardom than
college baseball, and there are far more scholarship possibilities for the
former than the latter. Under Commissioner Bud Selig, major league baseball has
made great efforts to rejuvenate the game in urban areas through its Revive
Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI) program.
Still, some African-American players, such as the Los Angeles Angels’ Torri
Hunter, have complained that management’s search for Latin players comes partly
out of a desire for a cheaper and more malleable work force.

As
players take the field with Robinson’s historic 42 on their back, there will be
relatively few African Americans in the lineup or on the mound, though nearly
40 percent of the participants will be people of color (2011 Race and Gender
Report Card, p.2). Indeed, no sport better reflects the multiculturalism of
today’s US more than baseball with its large Latino and Asian contingents. Without Jackie Robinson’s courage 65 years
ago, the contemporary diversity of the sport would be inconceivable.

Sources:
Rob Ruck, Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black
and Latin Game (Beacon Press, 2011)

“2011
Race and Gender Report Card,” The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in
Sports.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Mike
Wallace’s career parallels and illustrates the major shifts in American
journalism during the second half of the 20th century.In the aftermath of the unifying experience
of World War II, reporters were more inclined to accept public pronouncements
from government officials.Following the
twin shocks of Vietnam and Watergate, however, journalists became more
skeptical and confrontational, and Wallace and “60 Minutes” helped lead the
way.

During
the early postwar period, most Americans expressed a faith in their leading institutions
that seems stunning today.Polls
routinely showed that 2/3 to 3/4 of Americans trusted the government to do the
right thing all or most of the time.Such beliefs underpinned the “consensus” liberalism that dominated
politics between the late 1940s and mid-1960s, as both Republicans and
Democrats supported programs like the interstate highway system, public
housing, and the G.I. Bill.

As a result,
the media did not challenge politicians in the same way they do today.Reporters often accepted Senator Joe
McCarthy’s accusations about communist influence in government without engaging
in serious investigations of his charges. Many simply couldn’t believe that a senator
would prevaricate about such an important issue.As
George Clooney’s 2005 film “Good Night and Good Luck” demonstrated, journalists
such as CBS’ Edward R. Murrow eventually took up the cause of fighting Senator
McCarthy, though they largely did so after his power started to fade following
the end of the Korean War in 1953.

The
deceptions surrounding the Vietnam War during the 1960s inspired a change in
the ethos of American journalism. In the early years of U.S. involvement, reporters
such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan watched U.S. military advisers claim
that their South Vietnamese allies were winning a war that the journalists thought
they were actually losing.After the
Americanization of the war began in earnest in 1965, the Johnson Administration
repeatedly claimed the U.S. was making progress against the Viet Cong (VC) and
their North Vietnamese backers (NVA), even as casualties mounted.Reporters grew so frustrated by the lies of
the military leadership that they began to call the military briefings in Saigon,
“the Five O’ Clock Follies.”After the shock of the Tet Offensive by NVA
and VC forces in January 1968, the continuing pronouncements by U.S. commanders
that they could see “the light at the end of the tunnel,” lost any credibility.

“60
Minutes” premiered on CBS that same year and Mike Wallace was one of the
original correspondents.Reflecting the
more cynical climate of the time, the show pioneered the “newsmagazine” and became
the leading edge of investigative journalism on television.When the show began, Wallace was a relative
unknown but his confrontational style made him the star of the program,
impressive given that it featured (at various times) leading journalistic
lights such as Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, and Lesley
Stahl.

The
Watergate scandal and the Washington
Post’s iconic coverage of the story furthered public cynicism about
politics while enhancing the prestige of journalism.Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s
investigation into the scandal for the Post,
as well as Hollywood’s portrayal of their work in “All the President’s Men”
(1976), inspired a new generation to pursue careers in investigative
journalism.

During
this era, Wallace and “60 Minutes” thrived, particularly after it began airing
on Sunday nights.The quality of the
show’s reporting, along with the lead-in provided by NFL football on CBS, made
the program one of the most successful in television history, as it was no. 1
in the ratings for five consecutive years (NYT,
April 9, 2012).The show’s ticking clock
became iconic and the program inspired numerous imitators, including “20/20”
and “Dateline”

By the
90s, some bemoaned the more confrontational tone of the modern media, claiming
that a generation of reporters striving to be the next Woodward and Bernstein turned
every scandal into another Watergate, regardless of its merits.Such criticism became particularly strong
during the Clinton impeachment coverage of 1998-99.

Some also
believe that corporate ownership of the major broadcast networks has
compromised the independence of their news divisions.Even the venerable “60 Minutes” did not
escape this controversy, especially when corporate officials at CBS, fearing a
lawsuit from a tobacco company, watered down a Wallace report about a whistleblower
in the mid-1990s.This led to an unflattering
depiction of Wallace in Michael Mann’s 1999 movie “The Insider.”

Finally,
others critics think the media has reverted back to 1950s-style journalism, alleging
that the New York Times andother mainstream outlets simply
regurgitated the Bush Administration’s claims regarding the existence of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq.Even
Woodward, who became an icon of establishment journalism, came under fire for
writing two books that painted the Bush Administration’s wars in a positive
light.Whereas conservatives have criticized
the media for “liberal bias“ going back to the 1960s, liberals began to
distrust the mainstream media in the early 21st century, turning to
nontraditional sources like blogs for news.

Throughout
all of this change, Wallace and “60 Minutes” continued to thrive in the ratings.Indeed, one could argue that “60 Minutes” is
the most successful program in the history of television, given that the show
has remained a hit for over four decades.Though Wallace himself retired in 2006, “60 Minutes” continues to be the
most enduring example of the skeptical journalism that emerged from the 1960s
and 70s.

Crime and
urban riots, two key issues during the 1960s, moved to center stage in this
week’s episode, “Mystery Date,” which takes place in July 1966. The Vietnam War and drugs made a secondary
appearance, though one can safely assume they will return in prominent fashion
during upcoming episodes and seasons.

Violent crime
rose dramatically in cities across the country during the 1960s, especially
during the second half of the decade. In
New York City, crime increased by 137 percent between 1966 and 1973
(Cannato, Ungovernable City, 527). Working alone on a Friday evening and afraid
that someone may have broken in, Peggy cautiously explores the office and discovers
that Dawn, Don Draper’s new secretary, has been sleeping in his office on some
nights. Dawn feels she doesn’t have a choice because no cab will take her back
to Harlem at night and her family thinks the subway is unsafe. Her fears are heightened because of the highly
publicized rape/murder of eight nurses in Chicago as well as the race riot in
the Second City.

Peggy
insists that Dawn stay with her and they seem to bond over being outsiders at
the firm. After all, Peggy was the only
female copywriter at Sterling Cooper for several years and Dawn is now the only
African American working at any position at the office. Their bonding ends on an awkward note when
Peggy glances nervously at her purse and appears afraid that Dawn might steal
her money during the night.

Meanwhile,
Henry Francis’s mother Pauline and Sally Draper are also frightened by the
nurse killings, even though they would seem to be safely out of harm’s way in
the Westchester County suburbs. Sally’s
adolescent fears are understandable, but Pauline Francis’ bizarre behavior,
which includes conspicuously holding a knife for protection, only serves to heighten
them. With Sally unable to fall asleep,
Pauline gives her some kind of sleeping pill.
Could this be the start of a larger drug problem for Sally?

The urban
riots of the 1960s, which characters have mentioned in previous episodes, continue
to garner attention in the show. While
there were several disturbances in 1966, they have been overshadowed
historically by the more violent and destructive riots in Watts in 1965 and
Detroit and Newark in 1967. Several
characters mention upheaval in Chicago, which did boil over in what civil
rights historian Taylor Branch described as a “miniature Watts,” where two people were killed between July 12 and July 15 (Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 501-505). Erupting after police shut off fire hydrants
during a heat wave, Mayor Richard J. Daley blamed the violence on Martin Luther
King, who was then in the middle of a major campaign for open housing in Chicago.
In fact, King and his organization, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who were in the midst of their
first foray into the North, worked hard to prevent the riot.

Vietnam also
enters the picture as Joan’s husband Greg returns following a tour of duty in
Southeast Asia. Instead of having a joyous
homecoming, Greg, who is an Army surgeon, tells Joan that he has to go back for
a second tour. Joan is furious when she
discovers he volunteered to return, declaring, “Who goes back?” sarcastically
adding, “I will throw a parade for you
everyday for preserving freedom!” Reflecting the growing domestic divisions
during the second year of an Americanized war, Greg alleges that, “If this was
World War II and the Japs were still attacking us, you’d say yes! Of
course!” Joan responds, “Soldiers wanted
to come home from World War II also.”

Unable to
continue with Greg, who has repeatedly shown contempt for her throughout their
relationship, Joan asks him to leave for good.
The episode ends with Joan in bed with her mother and son, with sirens blaring
in the background, perhaps another sign of the growing disorder in America
during the mid-1960s.

Sources:

Taylor
Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, (New York,
2006)

Vincent
Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay
and His Struggle to Save New York (New York, 2001)

Thursday, April 5, 2012

As a kid growing
up in the 1980s, I was always extremely excited for the opening day of the
baseball season. In the pre-Internet
days, I remember calling a USA Today 1-900
toll number to find out the results of the first games of the season. Over the last 25 years, though, the buzz
surrounding opening day seems to have diminished. Throughout the bombastic exchanges between
Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless on ESPN’s First
Take Wednesday morning, the two barely discussed baseball, even though
opening day was the following day. Tony
Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon did the same on Tuesday’s Pardon the Interruption. What
has happened?’

One key
reason for the lower buzz for baseball’s start is the rise of the National
Football League (NFL). Though football
was already the most popular sport in the country by the 1980s, the gap between
the NFL and major league baseball has grown significantly since then. Last summer, discussion of the NFL lockout
overwhelmed discussion of the baseball season.
Football, not baseball, is the national pastime today. See http://popculturemeetshistory.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-football-came-to-dominate-america.html

Another
factor is the proliferation of sports across the entertainment landscape. Late March and early April are much more
crowded than they were was a generation ago.
“March Madness” and the Final Four dominate the discussion in the weeks
before the debut of baseball. Though the
Masters has always been held around opening day, the first golf major of the
season has also risen in importance since the Reagan era. With the emergence of Tiger Woods in the late
90s, the event has grown in popularity, with casual sports fans much more
likely to tune when Woods is in contention (which is virtually always the case
at the Masters) See http://popculturemeetshistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/tigers-woods-impact-on-golf-15-years.html

With
Tiger retuning to form following his scandal-induced slump, anticipation for
this year’s “tradition unlike any other,” is as great as any in recent memory. Frankly, I’m more excited for the first round
at Augusta National than for opening day.

Baseball continues
to have a tremendous following and can still produce incredible excitement. In
fact, it’s hard to think of any sports night in recent memory more gripping
than last season’s final slate of games, when the wild card berths in both
leagues remained at stake. Nor can many
events match the drama of last year’s World Series, in which the St. Louis
Cardinals won, even though the Texas Rangers were one strike a way from winning
on two different occasions in Game Six.
Nevertheless, it seems like the buzz around the start of the season
isn’t what it once was.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

“There it
is. A win for the ages,” declared CBS’ Jim Nantz as Tiger Woods closed out his
historic victory at the 1997 Masters.Playing his first major as a professional, the 21 year-old Woods
dominated Augusta National for four days, setting a new course record as he
crushed the field by an incredible 12 strokes.This triumph by an African-American golfer carried an additional resonance
because it occurred at Augusta, a Georgia country club that had only admitted
its first black member in 1990.Indeed,
no African American had even played in the Masters until Lee Elder teed off in
1975.Golf would never be the same and
the sport seemed primed for meteoric growth as Tiger set his sights on breaking
Jack Nicklaus all-time record of 18 major championships.While the Tiger era produced incredible
interest in golf, its impact has not been as revolutionary as might have been
expected 15 years ago.

In the decade
after his first Masters’ victory, Woods became the biggest draw in all of sports,
as the PGA Tour experienced huge ratings gains and purses grew. The TV viewership
for tournaments he won often exceeded the audiences for NBA games in the immediate
post-Michael Jordan years.From
1999-2002, Tiger achieved unprecedented success, winning 7 of 11 major titles at
one point, including four consecutive wins for a “Tiger Slam.”After stumbling while retooling his swing in
2003-04, Woods returned to dominate again from 2005-08, winning nearly half of
the events he entered, including 6 majors.At a relatively young age, Tiger made a plausible case that he was already
the greatest golfer ever.

In some
ways, though, Tiger’s impact has not been as dramatic as some imagined in the
spring of 1997.Many foresaw a surge of
minority golfers onto the PGA Tour, but Woods is the only African American
playing regularly today. In 2011, another
black player, Joseph Bramlett earned his tour card, only to lose it when he
finished 196th on the money list (only the top 125 keep their
memberships) Of course, Tiger is half Asian as well and may have inspired a slight
increase in Asian-American players.Witness the emergence of Anthony Kim and a few others.

Some
believed Tiger’s success would spawn rising participation in the sport across
the country.Instead, the number of golfers
declined over the last decade, falling from 28.8 million in 2000 to 26.1
million in 2010. (Golf Week, May 9,
2011) The reasons for this drop are complex, ranging from the Great Recession
to the high cost of clubs and country club memberships. With “Mad Men”
returning, we can see that gender roles have changed and the days when a husband
could just tell his wife he was going to go play nine holes after work have long
since passed.

More
troubling for the future of the sport is the dramatic decline in youth golfers,
with 24 percent fewer kids playing in 2008 compared with 2005.Despite Tiger’s celebrity, fewer young people
are taking up the game while more are playing tennis, where youth participation
grew by 28 percent over the last decade (Wall
Street Journal, May 21, 2010).The rise
of tennis over this period is particularly impressive given the fact that there
hasn’t been a major American star on the pro circuit since Andre Agassi’s
retirement in 2006.

After his
infamous car wreck outside his Florida home on Thanksgiving 2009, Tiger
struggled on the course for the following 2 ½ years, but he finally won a tour
event for the first time since that fateful night, surpassing the field at the
Arnold Palmer Invitational two weeks ago.Despite the bad publicity surrounding his divorce, Woods remains the
biggest draw in the sport, as the ratings for his victory were 129% higher than
the previous year’s final round.With
Tiger’s resurgence, anticipation is high for this week’s Masters and Woods will
be one of the favorites, along with longtime rival Phil Mickelson and 23
year-old Rory Mcllroy, whose dominating win at last year’s U.S. Open evoked
comparisons to Woods’ first Masters triumph.

Now 36,
Tiger has won 14 major championships, leaving him five short of breaking Nicklaus’
record.If Tiger can continue to regain
form, his chase of the Golden Bear’s mark will likely raise interest in the
sport once again.But it appears the
“win for the ages” didn’t quite change the world in the way some anticipated.

Monday, April 2, 2012

I very
much enjoyed “The Hunger Games,” which is a worthy successor to “Harry Potter”
as a young adult franchise with appeal to grownups. Based on the first of three books written by
Suzanne Collins, it is already a huge hit at the box office and will spawn
sequels that will be released in the summer or Christmas movies seasons, rather
than the spring doldrums. Featuring
traditional themes from literature and movies, “The Hunger Games” also offers a
biting critique of reality television.

The plot
is as follows (MASSIVE SPOILERS).
Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery, a 1984-style
totalitarian society holds a drawing each year to select a young boy and girl
from each of their 12 governing districts to participate in a competition against
each other. Called the Hunger Games, it
resembles the Triwizard Tournament from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”—only
it is to the death. The story then
follows Katness Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeka Mellark (Josh
Hutcherson), who have been chosen to represent District 12, as they participate
in the competition. The concept of the
12 districts is very familiar, echoing “Battlestar Galactica’s” 12 colonies,
and is likely influenced by the biblical notion of the 12 tribes of Israel (If
you don’t remember your Torah or Old Testament, just listen to Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”).

The
“Hunger Games” features elements of several reality television shows and
portrays government officials aiming to promote the best story line possible at
whatever cost. The implicit comparison
of agents of a dictatorial regime with television executives is quite harsh. With echoes of “Project Runway,” consultants
dress up contestants to look attractive in an Olympic-style opening ceremony
with chariots and other Roman overtones.
Indeed, the whole competition seems to revolve around giving the
oppressed populace, “breads and circuses” to distract them from their plight,
as the old Roman Empire did (one character is even named Caesar).

Once the
competition begins, participants make alliances a la “Survivor” with various
contestants working together against other groups and individuals. With the whole society watching, participants
need to earn the favor of the viewers, like on “American Idol,” in order to get
help from the audience to combat injuries and other obstacles. The characters resemble their counterparts
from other films depicting teenage life going back to the John Hughes movies of
the 1980s, as our hero and heroine are outsiders from a poorer district. Meanwhile, their most vicious competitors hail
from a wealthier district where, in an echo of the Cold War-era East German
sports machine, some are trained from birth to compete.

In order
to frustrate the growing popularity of Everdeen, whose success is spawning
dissent in the poorer districts, the government changes the rules of the game to
allow two competitors to win, as long as they are both from the same
district. After our heroes, who have developed
a romantic attachment, join together to successfully outlast the others,
officials change the rules back. Rather than try to kill each other, Everdeen
and Mellark decide to take poison, a la Romeo
and Juliet, but the government declares them both winners before they can
carry out their plan.

Their
chief handler (Woody Harrelson) warns them that this act of defiance may have
consequences for them, saying they must sell the story of their romance to the
state. Everdeen and Mellark appear as
guests on a talk show for a postmortem reminiscent of “The Bachelor” to discuss
how much they care about each other. The
ground is then laid for a sequel, as the Kim Jong-Il-like “Great Leader,”
played by Donald Sutherland, appears displeased at the reception the victors
receive upon their homecoming to District 12.

I have written
about the emergence of a lighter feel to action movies as memories of 9/11 fade,
but the “Hunger Games” contradicts this trend.
Indeed, the film’s plot resembles the darker themes of the latter “Harry
Potter” movies. It may be that the movie
reflects the book, which was published in 2008 and was developed in closer
proximity to the tragedy of 9/11 (Collins cites the Iraq War as a major
influence). Furthermore, a friend of
mine suggested that one of the legacies of 9/11 might be that books for young
adults now feature darker and more mature themes. In any case, I look forward to the next movie
in the series, though it is likely I will have read the books by then anyway.